In the lead-up to New Year’s Day, it has become very trendy of late to claim that the preceding year was “the worst ever.” Clearly, some context is in order. Below, a quick guide to some years that would have been more than happy to count Donald Trump as their biggest problem.

1347People in the Middle Ages had a bad habit of attributing anything bad or unusual to the wrath of a vengeful God. Starting in 1347, this was an exceedingly rational explanation for what was happening to them. The Black Death killed roughly one fifth of the world population, and up to sixty per cent of everyone in Europe. Panicked citizens who blamed the Jews for the plague would even launch a miniature Holocaust, razing thousands of European Jewish communities. The carnage of the Black Death was so overwhelming that, like many on this list, the people of 1347 feared that future generations (should they exist) would never believe that the plague had actually happened. “O happy posterity, who will not experience such abysmal woe and will look upon our testimony as a fable,” wrote the Italian poet Petrarch.

The Dance of Death, an etching from the plague era.Wikimedia Commons

1942 At the beginning of 1942, most of the Holocaust’s six million victims were still alive. By year’s end, death camps were opened across Europe and millions lay in mass graves, executed by genocidal death squads following the Wehrmacht’s advance into the Soviet Union. And this was only the most violent crescendo of a year that would be packed with indescribable quantities of human suffering. In a merciless response to the first U.S. air raid against Tokyo, Imperial Japan massacred whole villages in coastal China, killing 250,000 Chinese by year’s end. The Battle of the Atlantic was at its climax, sinking so many Atlantic vessels that even Canadian passenger ferries were being sent to the bottom. And the year would end in the freezing chaos of the battle of Stalingrad, the largest confrontation in the history of warfare.

1520 European contact had not been good for the Indigenous people of the Americas. In the 28 years since Christopher Columbus first stepped ashore on what is now Cuba, local peoples had been enslaved, killed in skirmishes and forced to deliver tributes of gold and cotton. But 1520 was when European contact would truly begin to wipe whole peoples from the map. This year saw Hernan Cortes reach the climax of his ruthless dismantling of the Aztec Empire, but the year’s most devastating legacy would be viral. Smallpox took hold for its major New World outbreak in 1520, unleashing the epidemiological equivalent of nuclear war on the Western Hemisphere. At the beginning of 1520, the population of current-day Mexico was about 20 million. By year’s end, up to eight million were dead or dying. The outbreak would set the stage for the next 300 years of New World colonization: Smallpox would ruthlessly scour humans from the landscape and then Europeans would walk in to easily dictate terms to the shattered survivors.

A Mesoamerican infected with smallpox in this engraving from a 16th century Spanish book about the just-defeated Aztec Empire.U.S. National Library of Medicine

536 This is the year that Harvard historian Michael McCormick has definitively pegged as the “worst year to be alive.” Although, given what happened, the mere act of living was a tall order in itself. A volcanic eruption forced the entire world under ashen skies, kicking off the coldest decade in more than two millennia. Chroniclers at the time said the sun was so obscured by pollution it was possible to stare directly at it. Then, only five years later, the Plague of Justinian killed up to one quarter of whoever was left. Grinding poverty was already the norm in 536, but that year saw much of humanity descend into a generation or two of particularly acute misery.

The Plague of JustinianFile

1816 In June 1816, snow fell in New England. Birds dropped dead from the sky. Shorn sheep froze to death in the fields. Frost robbed whole orchards of fruit. It would come be to known as the Year Without a Summer. And this kind of climatological madness was happening all around the world. China was racked by starvation after losing much of its rice crop. Heavy rains in India incubated a devastating cholera epidemic. Europe suffered its last widespread famine, and oat shortages killed so many horses that a German baron was compelled to invent the bicycle. The culprit for all this was the eruption of the Indonesian volcano Tambora, which enshrouded the planet in a thin layer of sun-blocking ash. “To be alive in the years 1816-18, almost anywhere in the world, meant to be hungry,” wrote Gillen D’Arcy Wood, an expert on the Tambora eruption.

An engraving from an early edition of Frankenstein, a book famously written by Mary Shelley in the gloomy depths of the Year Without a Summer.Wikimedia Commons

1918 The First World War did not end gently. The final year of the war saw a spasm of offensives and counter-offensives that added millions to the final death toll. The United States, for one, would suffer nearly the entirety of its 116,000 First World War deaths in 1918. Even the signing of the Nov. 11 armistice could not bring peace to a world where the Russian Civil War, among others, were already well underway. At the same time, a deadly influenza incubated on the Western Front would spread to virtually all corners of the known world, killing about as many as the then-population of the United States. This is easily a top contender for the worst year in Canadian history. Halifax was still in ruins from the Halifax Explosion, 50,000 were dead from the Spanish flu and the Conscription Crisis would leave Canada more politically divided than at any other point in its history.

A burial on the Western Front in May, 1918.Library and Archives Canada

1960 This rarely makes anyone’s list for “worst year” because, so far as most people knew, it wasn’t all that bad: The U.S. elected John F. Kennedy, Israel captured Adolf Eichmann and the Beatles got a residency at a bar in Hamburg. But in China, deftly shielded from the world’s media, the country was suffering from the worst single disaster in history. The disaster was entirely manmade: Dictator Mao Zedong had forced his people to carry out a series of wildly impractical schemes designed to launch them into the modern age. Instead, they utterly shattered the country’s ability to produce food. An estimated 45 million Chinese were killed, and everyone else was forced to lie, steal or make unspeakable decisions to stay alive. “Collectivization forced everybody, at one point or another, to make grim moral compromises,” wrote Frank Dikotter, a historian of the famine. “Routine degradations thus went hand in hand with mass destruction.”

Employees of the Shin Chiao Hotel build small, rudimentary steel smelting furnaces during the “Great Leap Forward” in October 1958, in Beijing, China. The Great Leap Forward would soon kill more people than any other single event in history.AFP/Getty Images

1241 Time has been kind to Genghis Khan. He has a hit German pop band named after him, he’s frequently a sympathetic character in children’s cartoons and Mongolia reveres him as a hero. But 750 years ago Khan and his successors engineered the brutal killing of so many people that it had a measurable impact on the world’s climate as thousands of farms transformed back into wilderness. For much of Europe and Asia, conquest by the Mongols brought horrors far worse than anything perpetrated by ISIL. The Persian metropolis of Merv, then the largest city in the world, was so completely destroyed by Mongol invaders that it still lies in ruins. When Khan lost a grandson in the Bamiyan Valley of modern-day Afghanistan, he ordered every living thing in the region killed. Khan died in 1227, but 1241 was when the Mongols began their most earnest drive into Eastern Europe, massacring or enslaving everyone in their path. Roughly half of Hungary would not survive.

Statue of Genghis Khan on horseback, at Tsonjin Boldog, east of the Mongolian capital Ulaanbaatar.File

72,000 years ago This list has plenty of instances of cities, peoples and civilizations being evaporated by tragedy. But none of these calamitous years come close to bringing the human species to extinction. For that, an unknown year 72,000 years ago still claims the title. Toba, a Sumatran supervolcano, shrouded the earth in a thick haze that dropped global temperatures by as much as 20 degrees. Just as with the asteroid-initiated dust clouds that killed the dinosaurs, many species would not survive this particularly brutal post-Toba planet. On the grasslands of Africa, a relatively new primate now known as homo sapiens was hit so hard by hunger and cold that they were reduced to as little as 40 breeding pairs — well within range of being critically endangered. For context, there are currently 1,800 giant pandas living in the wild.

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